Greetings from the Bolt Bus. I’m en route back to New York from a whirlwind trip to Boston that included visits to several dietetic internship sites and drinks with a girlfriend and coffee with other people I don’t get to see enough and a delicious meal at this restaurant called The Elephant Walk in Cambridge.

In my former life as a Writing and Publishing student, I didn’t seem to understand that one could both enjoy food and cooking and write well (I read way too much Bukowski in college, and thought that to have any cred, I needed to live on whiskey and wine and cheap stew and, like, nickel-candy bars and just write all night long about, well, things). But then, I also smoked cigars and wore cowboy boots every day and didn’t own a hairdryer and sort of pretended I wasn’t an honors student, so there you go. Clearly, it was just a phase. Now, I often do my best creative writing while stirring a pot of soup or waiting for lentils to cook.

The point of this post is to tell you to read Nora Ephron’s 1983 book Heartburn. I just read it in one sitting and loved it. Somehow, she manages to turn a novel about a cookbook author who, seven months into her pregnancy, discovers her husband is having an affair into a laugh-out-loud (on the bus!) read.